1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information retrieval and, more particularly, to systems and methods for creating a ranking function from large data sets and using the ranking function to rank documents.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web documents in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant results to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web documents. Web documents that contain the user's search terms are “hits” and are returned to the user. The search engine oftentimes ranks the documents using a ranking function based on the documents' perceived relevance to the user's search terms. Determining a document's relevance can be a tricky problem.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems and methods that improve the determination of a document's relevance.